La Taberna del Escocés

Thirteen grand. It’s easy to say but I had never made that much in one of the Meazza’s poker nights. Needless to say it was a lot less than the total amount I had lost at that very same table in the last two years. Still, though, Giancarlo Meazza found himself having to fulfil his civic duty and politely let me know that if I let my face show up in his card party again in the following three months I’d be in need for strict diet of milkshakes and pain killers for the following six. Yeah, yeah, but whose pocket is the thirteen grand in, eh? You, Giancarlo? well, there. That’s what I told him. Well, that’s what I thought, anyway.

Euphoria is not the best of counsellors. It advised me to quit my job. That fucking alienating, crude and humiliating job which, if I must be honest, has paid for the last three years rent, drinks, company from time to time and especially for gambling debts. So I patiently waited to hear the same fucking story from my editor in chief:

- What does this shit mean? Is this what I pay you for? Anyone can write this bullshit!!

Papers shuffled around, irate expression,… the usual ceremony. So I enjoyed every second of the change of script.

- Let’s do one thing. You write it and save yourself my salary.
- What?

Perplexity didn’t do him any good, when he stopped frowning he looked like an asshole.

- You write it and save yourself my salary. You give me three months, I gather my stuff and I’m out of here.
- Two months.
- Done.
- A month and a half.
- Hey chief…

My stuff would fit in my briefcase. Three novel projects, neither anything more than a weak plot and a few character sketches. And all office material I could get my hands on. What the fuck, that’s why I had asked him for a three month salary anyway!.

I felt free, free and rich. Because being free and poor really sucks. I had no income but I did have a job. I was finally a writer; a writer without stories or ideas, but a writer after all.

I really didn’t have a clue about starting up a new life. Lack of habit, I guess. But I remembered how, as a kid, my grandfather would take me for a walk in the old port and bought me lupins which we would later share in the breakwater where we threw the shells out into the sea. That was before the war. I hadn’t been there for years but the place didn’t seem to have changed a whole lot. Though, obviously, no longer did anyone go there for a walk or were there any lupin stands. And , why try to fool myself, I didn’t feel like lupins or nuts or anything the like. I rather felt like cereal. The fermented type of cereal.

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